Chapter 6
Donovan
There were supposed to be twelve of them.
That was the number Ethan had flown us halfway around the world to train, and on the first morning of the actual work, seven of them turned up to the muster yard when they were called.
Four more straggled in late. The twelfth didn’t come at all, and nobody could tell me where he’d gotten to or seemed to think it was a question worth asking.
I stood beside Andrew at the edge of the packed dirt and took the view of their formation in, that is if you could call the loose knot in front of us a formation.
One kid carried his rifle slung muzzle-down, the barrel eating the dirt.
Another wore uniform trousers and a faded football shirt.
A third had his uniform shirt on inside out, the seams and a laundry tag showing pale at his collar.
“Well,” Andrew said, “they came.”
“Eventually.”
Cole moved out a few steps ahead of Andrew and me and squared up on the group. He didn’t raise his voice or call for quiet. He just held there and let his gaze move over them, one man at a time, until the muttering thinned and went out.
“My name is Cole Braddock, as some of you already know,” he said.
“These two are Andrew Volante and Donovan Hughes. We work for a company called Citadel. You’ve all had schooling in English as well as Swahili, so we can do this without an interpreter, which makes it easier on everybody.
We are here to make sure you have the necessary skills to protect the wildlife on this reserve and to make it home alive. ”
Nothing came back. A couple of them glanced at each other. One yawned and didn’t trouble to cover it. A kid near the back murmured something, and the two beside him laughed.
Cole didn’t rise to it. “You know this land better than we ever will. We know the things that keep men breathing. That’s the trade.”
I read their eyes while he talked. Most of them had gone glassy and elsewhere before he was halfway through, bored by a speech they’d already decided had nothing to do with them.
Two of them didn’t.
The first was the one I already knew about. Zayn Kipsang stood a little apart from the rest. He was twenty, and of all of them, he was the only one who looked like he already knew what he was doing.
The second, I’d seen the day before—the kid with the limp, the one Cole said the others gave a hard time and who stuck around anyway.
He hung back at the edge of the group, younger than the others, one foot turned wrong beneath him and the boot built up under it.
He was listening harder than any of them.
“All right,” Cole said. “Let’s start with the rifles.” He looked at me.
“Present your weapons for inspection,” I said. “Hold them out where I can see them.”
They held the rifles out, and I walked the line.
Up close, it was worse than I’d guessed.
Rust freckled the receivers, and dust sat packed into actions nobody had opened in weeks.
One barrel had enough grit down it to plant a garden.
A gas plug had seized so hard with old fouling that the kid holding it couldn’t have adjusted it if his life depended on it, which out here, it might.
Most of them couldn’t tell me the last time they’d cleaned the thing, because the honest answer was never.
I took the worst one of them out of its owner’s hands. “Anybody tell me why you carry this?”
Nobody did.
“It’s the one thing out here that decides whether you go home.
” I turned it over so they could all see it.
“A lion doesn’t care how brave you are. A poacher with a rifle of his own doesn’t care how young you are.
This is what gets a say in it. And a rifle you can’t keep running is a heavy, expensive club. ”
One or two of them almost smiled.
“So you’re going to learn this weapon better than you know your own hands.
Clear it, strip it, put it back together in the dark, half asleep, with something coming at you out of the grass.
You take care of it before you take care of yourselves.
Before you eat, before you sleep. The day it counts, it’s the only thing out here that won’t run for you.
” I set it back down in front of its owner.
“Now, show me. Field-strip and reassemble.”
You could tell how well a man knew his rifle in the first ten seconds of watching him strip it. With these kids, it took about two.
They dropped parts in the dirt. One kid thumbed the takedown latch, broke the rifle open on its hinge, and then sat studying the halves as if someone had rearranged them while he blinked. Another had his back together in under a minute, quick enough that Andrew drifted over to look.
“That was fast,” Andrew said.
The kid beamed.
Andrew put out his hand. The kid handed over the rifle. Andrew snapped it open, slid the carrier out the back, and worked the bolt free, turning it up to the light.
“Bolt’s in upside down,” he said. “It’ll never lock. This one won’t fire.”
The kid’s smile went while he worked out what that meant. Andrew seated the bolt right, closed the rifle up, and handed it back gently enough before he moved on.
Across the group, Zayn already had his weapon apart and back together.
The rest of them got there eventually, more or less.
“Again,” I said. “All of you. Break it down, put it back together. Then again after that.”
That was when the big one spoke up.
He stood a head taller than the rest and carried a width through his shoulders the others hadn’t grown into yet. He’d hung back at the rear of the group through all of it, arms crossed, his rifle on the ground in front of his feet. Baraka. I’d caught one of the others use the name.
“I already did it.” He looked at the weapon on the ground in front of him and left it there. “Why do I have to do it again?”
“Because repetition is what builds the skill. Do it a thousand times and your hands do it without you.”
“And why should we listen to you at all?”
“Say that again,” Cole said, easy.
Baraka looked around at the others as he said it, working them. “You come here and tell us we’re doing it wrong. Our land. Our animals. You’ve been here, what, a few days?” A few heads nodded. “Why should we listen to a word you say?”
It was a fair question. It was the first intelligent thing anyone in that group had done all morning.
Andrew answered before Cole could.
“What makes you think you shouldn’t?”
“Because we don’t know you,” he said. “Not really. Anybody can walk in here and say he’s some kind of soldier.”
“True.” Andrew was smiling now, the way he did when he’d decided something was going to be fun. “So let us show you who we are. Make it a bet.”
“What kind of bet?” Baraka said.
“You think you’re already good at guarding this place,” Andrew said.
“So let’s find out. Before the sun’s down tonight, the three of us get into the middle of this camp and leave our mark on it, and not one of you sees us do it.
You’ll know we’re out there. You’ll be watching for us the whole time.
” He spread his hands. “A poacher won’t give you that much warning.
If we can still walk in on you, that’s your answer.
It means there are things we can teach you. ”
Someone laughed. Baraka came close to it himself. “You,” he said. “The three of you. Against all of us.”
“Against all twelve. You choose where you stand. You choose your watch. Your ground, your rules.” Andrew shrugged. “You know this place, and we just got here. Should be easy for you.”
“And when we win?” Baraka said.
“If you win, we leave.” Andrew shrugged. “We pack up and go, and you run this place your way.” He smiled. “But if we win, you’re ours. You train the way we say, as hard as we say, and we won’t hear a word about it. Deal?”
Baraka looked at the others. Whatever he read there made up his mind for him.
“Deal,” he said.
We went out with the afternoon still ahead of us. This kind of thing took daylight and time—hours to move a hundred yards, using the low sun and the long shadows and the patience most people didn’t have.
We walked out past the last building and into the tall grass, in plain sight of every ranger who cared to watch us go.
Once the land had folded the camp out of view behind us, we stopped and got to work.
We worked charcoal and mud across our faces, grass and cloth into our kit, breaking up the outline and every hard edge a person’s eye knows to look for, until there was nothing left of us that read as men.
Moving through open country like that was mostly a matter of knowing when not to move. You went so slowly that a man looking right at you would swear you were part of the ground, a few inches at a time, freezing the instant anyone turned your way.
You kept an eye on the animals, because they read you long before people did. A stand of impala grazing easy out in the open meant nothing had spooked them, which meant the three of us working in through the grass still weren’t reading as a threat.
We came in through the tall grass on the west side, low and agonizingly slow. Somewhere in the first hour Cole broke off to loop wide and set up our distraction, and Andrew and I kept on for the middle.
Getting flat forty yards out, chin in the dirt, had cost me close to five hours. I’d low-crawled several hundred yards of brush to get there, a few inches at a time, since the afternoon was still high. From there, I watched them defend their camp.